How Can I Help My Body Regulate Thyroid Hormones?
When it comes to improving thyroid health, you might be thinking: how can I affect thyroid hormones being made when my body regulates it automatically?
Good thyroid health is largely influenced by three main things:
Good communication between the hypothalamus and the anterior pituitary to regulate hormones,
Ensuring that your body is getting enough co-factors (vitamins and minerals responsible for thyroid hormone being made)
Regulating external factors that affect your body’s ability to regulate; stress, sleep, food, hydration, reducing endocrine disruptors (such as plastics) etc.
There’s a circular component, meaning that helping one aspect will have flow on to building up and supporting the other areas.
First we’re going to focus on understanding more about the hypothalamus and anterior pituitary; what they do, and why it matters. As seen in the pictures below that I hyper-fixated on making for a good while this afternoon, we start in your brain at the hypothalamus, AKA: the control centre. It’s job is to maintain homeostasis, or simply put, keep internal balance. Of all the things it balances, hormones are a notable one.
The hypothalamus releases thyrotropin hormone (TRH), probably best thought of as a pre-curser hormone, which goes to your anterior pituitary.
If hypothalamus is the control centre, then the anterior pituitary is the regulator. It gives the instruction of how hard to work. If something is too high, it’s going to get lowered, and vice versa. As you can see from the pic below, a lot of hormones are regulated here!
The anterior pituitary regulates your TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone), ACTH (Adrenocorticotropic hormone), FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) & LH (Luteinising Hormone), GH (growth hormone), prolactin, and endorphins.
You might already be familiar with prolactin, or LH/FSH from cycle regulation or fertility support; LH/FSH target ovaries to say “work harder”.
High FSH, for example, tells us that the ovaries aren’t working well, because they’re taking a lot of stimulation in order to produce an egg. Focusing back to TSH; the same principle is involved with thyroid. If we need TSH, thyrotropin hormone will go up. If we don’t, it’ll go down. The body is saying “work harder” and high TSH is therefore a hint to us that the thyroid is sluggish, because it’s taking a lot of stimulation to produce thyroid hormones.
Once TSH is released from/made in the anterior pituitary, it goes to the thyroid gland in the neck, which then stimulates the thyroid to make T4 (the active form of thyroid hormone) & T3 (the storage form of thyroid hormone.
Helping your hypothalamus and anterior pituitary to regulate isn’t going to happen overnight. Making hormones take time - slow is fast.
At home, you can focus on the third point we started with; regulating your system.
Removing and reducing endocrine disruptors is a HUGE one; plastics, environmental toxins, perfumes, etc. ‘Low Tox Life’ by Alexx Stuart is a helpful book to implement simple changes.
Prioritise your sleep so your hormones are able to do their thing while you’re at rest. Create a fixed sleep time, and book-end your day so you’re priming your body with wind-down routines. Bodies love consistency. If your work or young children throw out that balance, getting some extra support through a health professional will provide targeted help.
Eat regularly. Hormone health loves frequency (that means avoid intermittent fasting unless you’ve been directly instructed otherwise by your trusted health professional), whole foods and protein with every meal.
Ensuring you’re getting the right co-factors (vitamins and minerals) to make thyroid hormones in the first place requires individual recommendations. There are optimal ranges to base your health around, and additional supplementation suggestions are best done after a consult.
Regardless of whether you’re ‘doing all the right things’ or limited in being able to make those changes, you can get additional targeted support at any stage; from just getting into how to better support your body, to managing existing thyroid conditions.
Laelia is an Acupuncturist and TCM practitioner who loves to support people in feeling less depleted.